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Make your world a better place!

So here we go – something to do. Are you a web developer with some time on your hands that wants to do something creative, useful and potentially world-impacting? Then Tom Steinberg’s charitable web incubator MySociety.org might be an ideal environment for your talents. It’s an attempt to build applications that might enrich or contribute to civic society – applications that fulfil a need just like UpMyStreet.com andFaxYourMP.com do. There’s an article in the Guardian today which explains it more successfully and eloquently than I can hope to. Here’s a quick pithy excerpt:

We are setting up an organisation you might think of as a charitable incubator for those who want to develop software to make society better, and who want to pay the bills while doing it. We’re calling it MySociety.org. And we need your help … Companies don’t produce these tools because there isn’t money in it. Government has a different problem. It doesn’t seem able to take advantage of what the internet is best at – applications that are cheap to produce, that do something peopleneed and cost roughly the same no matter how many people are using them. Sadly, the public sector seems bound by all sorts of obligations that prevent it from being able to create such cheap and cheerful services … Complaining about this isn’t any good – we need to demonstrate how it can be done. Which is where MySociety.org comes in.

8 replies on “Make your world a better place!”

I met Tom S. the other day at that BBC Broadcast Assassins thing. He’s a bit of an anorak, but he’s got some nice ideas. I’m not entirely sure where he thinks the funding for mySociety.org is going to come from — businesses are generally quite reluctant to fund things that people don’t use (yet) and that don’t make them money… I wish him the best of luck though.

World, Web, Technology and Change
Tom Coates, in his article Make your world a better place!, pointed me to MySociety.org. A very interesting concept in many respects. First, they’re talkin’ money: We believe that in order to deliver polished, highly usable social tools, developers wil…

You’re on to something here. We can’t rely on the companies to do anything for the “greater good”. Being a lowly student, funding for this project I cannot provide, and the brotherhood is as yet not online. But, I work for free, and so does the brotherhood. We got us some competant programmers, web designers, graphic designers, artists, and others, so…if we can help any…

You’re on to something here. We can’t rely on the companies to do anything for the “greater good”. Being a lowly student, funding for this project I cannot provide, and the brotherhood is as yet not online. But, I work for free, and so does the brotherhood. We got us some competant programmers, web designers, graphic designers, artists, and others, so…if we can help any…

i really want to help the kids of skid row, new york. this is sooo important to me. kids are our foundation for the future, and these kids deserve a chance. please join me in supporting the kids of skid row and giving them a better place to live. thank you so much. please email me about your ideas or what you think about this about mlraasch399@hotmail.com
thanks
melissa

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